The essence of sumo wrestling is simple: two enormous men struggle to throw each other out of a ring. On Sunday, Donald Trump attended a major sumo tournament in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, awkwardly awarding the newly invented “President’s Trophy” to the winner. The metaphor was obvious: Throughout his state visit, Trump was like a sumo wrestler who Abe desperately wanted to move on key policy positions, but the president wasn’t budging. The most impor

The strategic rivalry between China and the US has incited an outbreak of historical analogies -- Athens versus Sparta, the UK versus Wilhelmine Germany, or the US versus the Soviet Union. But the fracas over the US actions against Huawei Technologies recalls another antecedent: the pre-World War II US pressure campaign against Japan.Once again, the US faces an aggrieved Asian power seeking to claim its place in the geopolitical sun, displace the US from Asia, transcend its economic dependency o

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prioritized pomp over policy while hosting US President Donald Trump this week. The one exception was the issue of North Korea, which recently conducted more short-range missile tests off its east coast. Abe is clearly anxious about keeping Japan and the United States on the same page now that Trump’s denuclearization talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un have faltered. But at a joint press conference on Monday, Trump dismissed concerns about the l

President Moon Jae-in may feel that he has adhered to a principled approach to historical issues with Japan. Nevertheless, he may also be realizing that it has come round to undermine his position on the diplomatic stage of Northeast Asia.If he has an ulterior motive -- if, as critics charge, he intends to use the inflammatory issues to his domestic political advantage -- he stands to pay substantial costs in practical terms.Since he took office two years ago, the bilateral relationship between

In his internationally acclaimed dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-four,” George Orwell portrayed the world as divided into three regions: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. According to Orwell, Oceania was composed of the United Kingdom and the United States, and Eurasia, which constituted the rest of Europe and Central Asia, was controlled by the Soviet Union. As for Eastasia, Orwell did not mention a specific country that either represented or ruled the region. Yet, at the time he was

The intensifying US-China confrontation has just taken a new twist. Reportedly, Washington is asking Seoul to join its anti-Huawei alliance. The reason is security concerns posed by the Chinese IT giant. This latest development puts South Korea in a difficult spot again. Korea is confronted with what it dreads most: choosing sides in a decisive manner.It is one thing to worry about the G2 confrontation and its overall economic impact. It is quite another to be forced to choose sides openly and o

There has been so much bad news lately that the only good news, if you believe it, lies in the stock market. Simply put, despite the trade war and all the political bad news, the US stock markets hover around historical highs. And Asian stock markets are still guided by sentiment in Wall Street.Is that market optimism justified?From its trough on March 9, 2009, to its last peak on April 23, 2019, the S&P500 Index rose 334 percent, so everyone who invested in US stocks has done well. How just

US President Donald Trump has long said the goal of his trade policy is simply to get better deals for Americans. But as the trade war intensifies, it seems increasingly likely that his policies will lead to something more: a lasting break with China and a new alignment of global power. First, consider the evidence for the break. The current impasse in trade talks was sparked by a sudden change in terms on the part of the Chinese negotiators. This change likely caught the administration off g

Will the imminent “rise of the robots” threaten future human employment? The most thoughtful discussion of that question can be found in MIT economist David H. Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still so Many Jobs?” which considers the problem in the context of Polanyi’s Paradox. Given that “we can know more than we can tell,” the 20th-century philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, we shouldn’t assume that technology can replicate the function

It’s college graduation season in China and the timing couldn’t be much worse for the record-breaking 8.34 million students emerging from university this year. A slowing economy, hobbled further by the trade war, has produced the worst Chinese job market since at least 2015. Among the hardest hit will be the aspiring white-collar workers just now throwing off their caps and gowns. Applicants far outnumber jobs in big cities and salary expectations simply aren’t being met.In rec

Huawei’s name is often translated in English as “Chinese excellence.” The Trump administration last week embarked on a campaign to rebrand the tech giant, in effect, as a “Chinese threat” and check its expansion in the West. The Huawei assault may be the Trump administration’s most important long-term strategic decision, because it confronts China’s technological challenge to America head on. The goal is to prevent Huawei from dominating 5G wireless comm

Korea today has an abundant supply of photo artists, poets and historians. New smartphones are equipped with high-definition cameras of 12 to 16 megapixels, which can produce great pictures. But our amateur photographers, many of whom are old, need something different. They go about on city streets, mountains and seashores carrying branded cameras -- the digital version -- with long lenses and even tripods to take thousands of shots of anything within their sight. Poets, of course self-styled, m

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump promised to pursue an “unpredictable” foreign policy to keep the nation’s enemies off balance. But in recent weeks, his unpredictability seems to be keeping his own administration off balance.　 Whether the issue is Venezuela, Korea or Iran, his administration has displayed contradictory positions that have created doubt about its true intent, both abroad and at home. They’ve been marked by barely concealed public dissen

This year marks the 40th anniversary of diplomatic ties between South Korea and Kuwait. In celebration of the occasion, I visited Kuwait along with Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon to further strengthen bilateral relations in early May. I serve as the vice minister in charge of national medical and health system and public health in Korea. In that regard, I believe the visit led to specifying cooperative measures with Kuwait whose health care demand is on the rise. Kuwait, located in the northe